The Badlands: Kinship

The air feels thick as I inhale. The glowing stick that Mia holds is the only source for light. We walk around the stone cave slab for a few feet to establish an idea of how stable we are underneath who knows how much weight in sand.

"The slab looks like it's part of something bigger." She slams her foot against the stone slab a couple of times.

"Don't tempt fate! We are lucky we aren't down there." I point into the deep blackened abyss.

She looks into the abyss below and pulls out another stick. She shakes it to glow like the other, tossing it down the blackness. It bounces back and forth down the seemingly endless way down. The light finally halts with a very quiet tap. The sound echoes to the distance.

"That's a long way down..." Mia says.

"Right?" I chuckle nervously.

"Any ideas?" She asks.

"Have a couple of shovels?" I ask.

"That's all you have for ideas?" She answers my question with her own.

"I figure we could dig our way to the surface." I reply.

"That would probably take weeks." She says.

"Then what's your big idea?" I ask.

She begins pacing. I can't help but watch. Back and forth. Forth and back. Like a metronome keeping time. I find the motion hypnotic as I feel a bit of a daze come over me.

"Something wrong?" Mia asks as she catches me watching her paint in a trance. I shake my head.

I don't know why, but I feel like something is off. I feel fuzzy headed. I have little thought and it's painful to try to think.

"The air.... " She says to herself.

She drops her pack in a fraction of a moment. Sifting through it she pulls out a silver cylinder only a few inches tall and a few inches wide. It opens at the top and expands into a meshed bowl shaped piece on a rod that goes out of it into the cylinder. The contraption begins whirring gently. I take a deep breath as the air begins to feel lighter. Each breath becomes easier until it feels as though I am upon the surface. Mia looks at me with concern. I nod. She smirks. She returns to pacing. The machine keeps running.

"So what is that?" I ask.

"It's pretty well a carbon filter for it to recycle the oxygen in the air. It was a project they were planning on using for the I.S.P.O.T.N." She explains.

"The I.S.P.O.T.N.?" I ask.

"International Space Program Of The Nations." She says.

"Seems a bit redundant." I laugh.

"The Old World hardly made sense, even with what I know of it."

"I see."

We stay in silence. I sit onto the slab and sigh. We need a way out of here. There has to be a way.

"What a way to go." Mia says as she sits beside me.

"What do you mean?"

"We aren't getting out of here alive, Etha." She presses the opinion.

"No, we just haven't figured it out yet." I snap.

She looks at me in shock. Either the fact I refuse to die is shocking or the fact I won't let her give up, is probably the cause to the expression on her face. Just because we aren't with ideas now, doesn't make us hopeless.

"Where did that come from?" She asks.

"I am not gonna die here when we are just outside of New Boston...." I say.

As I finish my sentence it occurs to me that we do know a way out. We have been overlooking it all this time. It's obvious now.

"I don't know what your thinking but you need to share." Mia clearly seen my face change to the dawning realization.

"What if we dig into the slab?" I grin.

"We fall into whatever is under it, if its not solid ground." Mia says.

"What do you think the odds are we are just above a cave system?" I elaborate more.

"Actually, considering that we just fell into this one, I would say pretty good." She replies.

"Got shovels?" I ask.

"Better, thanks again to Ark Tech." She grins so her entire top row of teeth are revealed like sparkling diamonds.

It's amazing, her smile even in this darkness shines so bright to me. I can't seem to stop my mind from thinking about how lovely that feature is of hers. everything we go through seems to tie us closer together. She leans into the pack she places upon the ground in search of something from within. She rustles through it and sighs before she rustles through it again. It seems she has misplaced something within the pack, or forgot to bring it along.

"C'mon.." She groans to herself.

I wait and watch. A low toned how comes up the hole echoing to us. I shiver to the surprise of the sound. There must be air from somewhere else in this hole. I smile as it brings me comfort that I will breathe fairly easily considering out bleak situation.

"Aha!" Mia shouts as she pulls a pen out, holding it above her head with full arm extension, being quite proud of her moment.

"So, what are we gonna do with a pen?" I ask.

"This one isn't any regular pen." She laughs.

I suppose I must seem rather naïve to not know the difference between ordinary and tech. I wasn't around over three thousand years ago, so how the hell would I know? I huff as I shake my head. It seems she forgets I am no scholar.

"Why so sour?" She asks.

"I feel so stupid."

"Don't. Old World tech is rare, let alone safe to even blindly examine." She admits.

"Oh?"

"I lost a friend, opened what he thought was a tuna can, turned out to be a bomb." She shakes her head.

"Brutal." I admit.

"Not even the tip of the iceberg." She sighs. "The only thing that survived of their body was their feet. Try explaining to a mother their child was vaporized by a tuna can." Her voice gets tense as it seems she tries to defend herself.

"Damn..."

"Anyways..." She huffs and draws a huge circular shape on the slab away from me.

The circle she drew is only wide enough to fit us in. She smiles as she walks me to the edge of the platform. I wonder why such distance from a mere drawing. She clicks the pens button. Blue light comes from the drawing as the inside falls with a hollow knocking. The circle drops the slab inside of it, creating a hole the size of the circle exactly. She looks to me. I shudder for a moment.

"What exactly made that happen?" I ask.

"Sound frequency activated acids." She smiles.

"That sounds really cool, but crazy dangerous." I smirk.

"Why do you think I say, seeing the Old World is dangerous in ways." She laughs.

We walk to the new hole as we take our turns fitting through it. Mia starts the idea by heading in the hole first. I hear her grunt and step aside. I don't need to shout to her, she is safe just based on the sound of movement. I go into the hole after her.

As I look up from the ground from landing on my feet, I can see all kinds of weird relics I never seen before. Walls all around are a deep reddened purple color. the floors lay checkered with black and white. We really have found a piece of the Old World. It may not be the piece we intend to go to, though, I feel like Mia sees this as an opportunity.

"Cool." She says at an almost inaudible volume.

"This is the Old World, isn't it?" I ask.

"A very small piece of it." She nods.

"Mia, we are going to gran relics while we are don here, aren't we?" I ask and she simply nods to reply to my question. "Anything in specific we know of?" I fire another question.

"We will know when we find it."

"If we find anything." I sigh.

"I am sure we will find something interesting." She sticks her tongue out at me.

I can't believe she just did what a five year old child would. She must know there is hidden value in the Old World. I can see why she would think so, given her tech. I wonder what she has to do to get the pieces of tech she has.

"The Old World, they had alot of knowledge huh?" I try to figure out what exactly I am seeing.

"Well, yes in one way, but no in almost every other respect." She sighs.

"How is that?" I ask.

"They had knowledge of the technology, how to make it and more. however the ultimately caused the world to permanently suffer because they could not contain the power they created, without it running them." She explains.

"Wow." I say.

I take a look around as we pace about the internal side of the slab. We go through a door with a sign which reads 'EXIT' above it. We come into a small room only with stairs. We can move up or down based on the stairs.

"Down or up?" She asks.

"Well we came from up. Let's try that." I say.

"Alright, sounds good to me." She says.

"Back to the surface then." I say.

We begin our way up the stairwell. From somewhere deep below we can hear the echoes of hissing in the depths of the structure. I shudder for a moment, only able to guess what may be lurking within this place.